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The State is Not a Family: Associations and Political Obligation
Our trek through the major theories of political obligation continues as we now move on to the association account.
It’s probably easiest to think of association theory as the “We’re all Americans” version of obligation. If you live in the United States, you’re an American, meaning you’re part of this thing called America, which is both the collection of all citizens and bigger than all of us. And being an American means respecting and obeying America’s institutions, including its laws.
This sets association apart from the other theories we’ve looked at. With fair play and gratitude, for instance, political obligations arise because of something we’ve done—whether accepting benefits or voluntarily participating in a cooperative scheme. With association, the obligations flow from who we are. Association theorists thus often draw parallels between country and family. As a father, I have obligations toward my daughter not because of some agreement we entered into or because I gained in some way from her. I have obligations to her because I am her father. Association simply applies this same sort of thinking to the state. Having political obligations is just part of what it means to be a member of the community. Given that our membership isn’t something most of us chose (we were instead born into it), our political obligations don’t flow from our choices, either.
This account depends on a number of assumptions, none of them particularly plausible. First, we very likely do have obligations arising from our role in our families, among our friends, or even in our very local community. But it’s not at all clear that the state is an association of a kind with those others. I don’t have a relationship with most Americans—let alone with Congress, the President, and the administrative agencies—that in any way parallels the relationship I have with my wife, my daughter, my parents, my friends, and my neighbors. In fact, when the state does try to act as if such a relationship exists (take Michelle Obama’s call that we all sign a father’s day card for her husband), it comes off as almost creepy.
Second, if political obligations flow entirely from community standards (“You’re an American, and Americans support their government.”) then it seems they bind us to the state no matter how bad it is. We might luck into a state that’s reasonably just, but we might just as easily have found ourselves politically obligated to turn over our peers to Stalin or to send Jews to the gas chambers. If the response is that of course you can’t be politically obligated to do that, then we’ve introduced moral standards outside of the association—and why can’t those moral standards include a prohibition on being obligated to a state involuntarily? It seems that, no matter what, we want some way to become unobligated to obey the state if the state grows bad enough. And this opting out shouldn’t be limited to “Love it or leave it.” For why, if the government behaves sufficiently unjustly so as to lose my obedience, should I also be forced to abandon my (true) community of my family, friends, and neighbors?
I don’t want to completely dismiss the strong feeling many of us have that we are, in fact, obligated to obey our government and that those obligations arise from it being the government of our country. The association theory matches quite well the unstated reasoning that leads most citizens to respect the will of the state. But those feelings by themselves don’t settle the issue. We might, after all, be mistaken in our emotion. And, at the very least, we want to leave open the option to back out of our obligations should the government change sufficiently that it no longer represents the America we’re a part of.
I’ll close with this passage from a paper by A. John Simmons, our most important contemporary philosopher of political obligation.
Absent any compelling argument for general political obligations (of the sort to which traditional theorists aspired), and absent any compelling argument for the independent binding power of local rules requiring obedience and support (of the sort to which proponents of the normative independence thesis aspire), it seems plausible to dismiss as a kind of false consciousness our feelings of obligation toward our countries of birth or residence. Of course we identify ourselves with “our” countries, “our” governments, and “our” fellow citizens. We have typically been taught from birth to do so, have typically spent our lives in a particular political culture, have been identified with a particular community by those outside our own (for purposes of praise or blame, say), and have associated with and become used to our own ways. That I might feel shame or pride at the acts of my countrymen (or that I might vote in elections and obey the law) is hardly surprising under these conditions. But none of this identification (along with its accompanying feelings of obligation) none of these ways of speaking and acting-seems, considered by itself, in any way inconsistent with denying that we are morally bound by political obligations to our countries of residence.
The appearance of authority must never be mistaken for the real thing.
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Our National Potlatch Dinner: Fair Play and Political Obligation
The fair play theory of political obligation political obligation goes as follows: We’re all in this together. Every one of us got where we are because of the sacrifices and tax dollars of those who came before. We benefit from the group endeavor that is government and so, when the time comes, it’s only right that we pay our fair share, both by cutting a check to the IRS and not mucking the whole thing up by disobeying laws.
Fair play’s probably the most common argument of the five I discuss in this series. It’s the sort of obligation-creating situation we’ve all encountered. The neighborhood collects money for a playground. If you enjoy it, you should pitch in. Your church group hosts a potlatch. If you plan to eat, you should bring something to share.
To put it more formally, if we benefit from a cooperative scheme, we need to abide by its rules or else we’re free-riding. Here’s H. L. A. Hart’s useful capsule version from his 1955 essay, “Are There Any Natural Rights?”:
When a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to those restrictions when required have a right to a similar submission from those who have benefited by their submission.
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick sets out an example: Imagine that your neighbors have all agreed to use the town’s public address system as an entertainment outlet. Each day, a new person spends several hours broadcasting music, amusing stories, and community news. You don’t actively seek out these broadcasts, but because you live in the neighborhood and it’s summer, so you’re often outside or have your windows open, and you hear quite a lot of it. Most days, the programming’s pleasant enough and, in some case, you enjoy it greatly.
Then your day comes around. Clearly you’ve benefited in some way from this cooperative scheme, and those benefits came via sacrifices made by your neighbors (they gave up their time to run the system). So are you obligated to pick out old records, polish off your anecdotes, and spend the day entertaining your peers?
Whether you are will depend an awful lot on what choice you had in benefiting. If your neighbors, counter to your wishes, decide to form a mob and wander from house to house cleaning cars, and if they come in the middle of the night or when you’re out of town and clean your car, it’s difficult to see how this would obligate you to become part of the car-cleaning mob yourself.
For fair play to create obligations, the benefits must be accepted. They can’t merely be received. If you never had a choice about rejecting the benefit, how can you possibly be compelled to repay it? In the public address example above, it’s clear you as the listener received the broadcast entertainment, but not at all clear you accepted it. For if you hadn’t wanted to hear the broadcasts, how would you have avoided them? Closed all your windows? Never gone outside?
With this in mind, the issue for fair play and political obligations becomes one of whether state benefits are typically accepted or just received. Do we have a choice about accepting the services our tax dollars pay for? What would be involved in avoiding them if we decide we don’t want to contribute to this particular cooperative scheme?
Another problem has to do with the kind of obligations fair play creates. It may be true that benefiting from the sacrifices of my neighbors and fellow citizens means I’m obligated to sacrifice similarly on their behalf. But does this moral obligation rise to a political obligation? Do I owe it to the state–or just to my fellow citizens? Because we can readily imagine a situation where, while my peers benefited me by paying taxes, I’d benefit them more (and thus improve the whole cooperative scheme to a greater degree) if I do something other than pay taxes. I might offer my services as a carpenter. Or take the time now afforded me because of state programs to invent a cure for cancer.
In short, even if fair play suffices to create obligations, it remains an open question whether it creates political obligations and whether the obligations it creates must only be fulfilled by paying taxes and obeying the law. It remains an open question, in other words, whether fair play applies to the state.
That’s a question I’ll explore next time.
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Theories of Political Obligation: Consent
In the story I told last time, you’re living with your family in Montana, raising cattle, drinking their milk, and generally bothering no one. Now the government’s decided that, first, they want to levy a tax on each head of cattle to pay for road construction and, second, drinking raw milk is illegal, so you’d better stop.
The question I raised was, “Are you politically obligated to obey either law?” If so, why?
Of course, you may choose to obey one or both of the laws for reasons of prudence–it’d be more trouble than it’s worth to disobey, you’re afraid of retribution by the government’s agents, etc.–but that would mean acting based on non-political-obligation justification. Likewise, you may feel you have a moral duty to not drink raw milk (you’ve been convinced by the arguments against it), but that duty need not be political. Remember, a political obligation is one you are duty-bound to follow because of its source (the state) and your relationship to it.
Theories of political obligation fall into five general sorts: consent, gratitude, fair play, association, and natural duty. Let’s start with the first. In my introductory post, I wrote,
The consent account is perhaps the easiest. Here, you have obligations because you consented to them. You agreed to obey the law and support the state by some statement or action you took. This could mean something as obvious as saying, “I agree to obey the laws and support the state.” But it needn’t be that explicit. You might have appeared in a crowd, with an agent of the state standing up front. The agent said, “Anyone who doesn’t consent, raise your hand.” By not raising your hand, you (perhaps) consented, thus creating political obligations. In our Montana story, maybe you consented to pay for road improvements by driving on the existing roads regularly when you went into town to run errands. Maybe you consented to obey the state’s laws–including the law against consuming raw milk–when you decided to remain in the United States instead of moving to some other country where raw milk consumption faces no prohibition.
This was Locke’s preferred method and it remains perhaps the most obvious. By explicitly binding ourselves to a political authority, we agree to abide by that authority’s rules. We consciously decide to undertake a moral obligation and then are, for some period, bound by it. (It seems clear that “consent” demands awareness of consenting. We can’t become bound via consent and not know it.)
But what counts as consent? As I said above, “explicit” consent clearly does. But few of us explicitly consented to be bound to our government. Instead, if consent happened at all, it occurred implicitly. The two most obvious ways this might happen are by living within a state’s claimed borders or by participating in its political process.
Let’s start with the argument from geography. In our story, you’ve lived in Montana your whole life. Both the state government and the federal government claim authority over the region and everyone who lives within it. By staying, have you tacitly consented to the state’s rule? At first it might seem so. After all, you know the land is within the jurisdiction of the United States and that the U.S. government expects to be obeyed by those who live within it. If you don’t like it, you can always leave, right? This is the “If you’re going to live under my roof, you better follow my rules” form of tacit consent.
But if tacit consent depends on making a choice between two possible actions–one that expresses consent and one that doesn’t–then the choice itself must be meaningful. If you’d been chained to a large rock in Montana your whole life, little sense could be found in saying you’d “chosen” to remain there. David Hume extended this meaningful/non-meaningful distinction to less far-fetched imaginings when he asked, “Can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires?” Further, given that every bit of land where one could reasonably live is already claimed by some government, none of us have the legitimate option to avoid the state altogether.
Merely living on land within the border claimed by a government may yet create obligations through one of the other four theories, but it’s difficult to argue that they come via consent.
What about voting? It seems that whether voting rises to the level of tacit consent depends much on the intent of the voter. Clearly, if the voter intends to become obligated by voting, then his act of voting acts as consent. But need it? A potential voter might live in the United States but not believe he has consented to be bound to its laws. However, he knows that the outcome of the upcoming election will impact him. One candidate may favor policies leading to greater pollution. Or one may be tougher on crime, making his election a potential security benefit. So our potential voter becomes an actual voter, but not because he consents to the legal system of the United States or because he consents to the rule of either potential victor. Instead, he votes for the same reason you might decide to give your wallet to a mugger: if all probable outcomes aren’t any good, it still makes sense to try to get the least worst one.
And what about the majority of Americans who don’t vote in most elections, either because they choose not to or because they can’t (felons, for instance). Have they consent by not voting? If not voting counts as consent and voting counts as consent, then what doesn’t count? “Not voting and staying put” doesn’t get us to tacit consent, either, because then we’re just back to the “under my roof” argument.
Consent theory is a rich and complex branch of the philosophy of political obligation, one with far more nuances and sub-arguments than I can explore here. What it has going for it is that, unlike the other theories of political obligation, consent clearly works. Those who do consent to be bound are bound. The trouble with consent, however, is its stringent demands. We can explicitly consent to become bound to a state’s laws, but very few of us actually do–and what counts as tacit consent is narrow enough that it likely doesn’t pull in even a majority of citizens..
So consent succeeds as a theory of obligation in the sense that it can create obligations, but it fails as a general theory binding most of us to the actual governments that claim to have authority over us.
We must look elsewhere.
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